In his only book-length work of literary criticism, Bates discusses writers principally from Russia, the United States, France, and Ireland, and in doing so pays homage to his own chief literary influences. In ten chapters, he explores the strengths and weaknesses of writers from Nicolai Gogol and Edgar Allan Poe to the new crop of English and Welsh writers of the early 1940s. He writes enthusiastically of the American tradition that includes Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, Sarah Orne Jewett, O. Henry, and Jack London, dwelling particularly on Stephen Crane, before a central chapter in which he compares Chekhov and Maupassant in such aspects as moral content, compassion, simplicity of construction, and the demands they each place upon the reader. Briefly discussing Tolstoy, Wells, and Kipling, he proceeds with greater enthusiasm to Katherine Mansfield, A.E. Coppard, Joyce's Dubliners, and the American renaissance of Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, Faulkner, Katherine Ann Porter, and William Saroyan. He closes with an appreciation of D.H. Lawrence and a roster of contemporary English authors writing after the first world war. In the course of these literary portraits, Bates explores the elements of a fine short story, and thus states his own deeply-felt goals as a writer: simplicity, implication rather than description, absence of moral teaching, and a high responsibility placed on the reader.

In the original preface, he pointedly excludes his own work from discussion, wishing instead to conduct "a critical survey of the modern short story as a whole" and not focus on his stories or methods. In the preface to the 1972 edition, Bates notes his mistaken prophecy of a renaissance for the form after the second World War; he decries the "era of the Angry Young Men, the Permissive Society or the Parade of Pornography" and especially what he calls the school of "tell all," which he considers antithetical to the spirit of the short story.

The reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement praises Bates as being "acute and unfailingly enthusiastic: he writer with lively imagination, and in combining criticism with literary history he is able to put forward a view of the evolution of the short story that carries wide and pointed suggestion."

An excerpt from the chapter "American Renaissance" was published as "A Note on Saroyan" later in 1941 in Modern Reading (September 1941, pp. 27-30); similarly, the chapter called "Tchehov and Maupassant" was reprinted in slightly altered form with the title "Artichokes and Asparagus" in Life and Letters To-day (London, October 1941) and later in A College Book of Modern Fiction (1961). The preface to the second edition was also published in Books and Bookmen in February 1972.